HELPING OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPERS AVOID LEGAL TROUBLE The nonprofit Software Freedom Law Center opened this week to provide free legal advice to nonprofit developers of open source applications in an effort to anticipate and avoid future intellectual property disputes. A primary impetus for the new organization is SCO Group's $1 billion lawsuit against IBM for allegedly adding SCO-owned code to Linux. Initial funding for the new center--totaling $4 million--comes from the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium of companies promoting Linux, including IBM, HP, and Intel. Heading the new center will be Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University and a specialist in copyright law and software, who will be joined on the center's legal board by Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford University; Diane Peters, general counsel of the OSDL; and Daniel Weitzner, a lawyer and researcher at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "The idea of the center," said Weitzner, "is to provide legal and strategic resources to help open source continue to grow." New York Times, 1 February 2005 (registration req'd) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/technology/01soft.html
RED HAT MAKES INROADS INTO GOVERNMENT MARKET Open source software continues to make inroads into government markets, as Linux company Red Hat this week announced a new business unit dedicated to the government sector. Paul Smith, the Red Hat vice president heading the government business unit, said that open source is a natural fit because of the level of attention government pays to IT standards. Red Hat government customers include the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. General Service Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Department of Defense. Red Hat is also working with the National Security Agency on a security-enhanced version of Linux, called SELinux. Meanwhile, Microsoft this week announced the Security Cooperation Program, under which the software giant will share information with government agencies. The move is seen as a response to the growing support for open source tools among governments. CNET, 2 February 2005 http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-5560238.html -- Neil Schneider pacneil_at_linuxgeek_dot_net http://www.paccomp.com Key fingerprint = 67F0 E493 FCC0 0A8C 769B 8209 32D7 1DB1 8460 C47D "All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies." -- Dr. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) -- KPLUG-List mailing list [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
